


In Mère's House

by Jeanny Turner (Ginada)



Series: Draco Malfoy in English [3]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: 2000, Draco Malfoy Speaks French, Gen, Le Havre, No Smut, Past Rape/Non-con, Post-Canon, Prostitution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-14
Updated: 2019-06-14
Packaged: 2020-05-07 19:01:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19215580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ginada/pseuds/Jeanny%20Turner
Summary: There are some customers who disturb even the routine of the second-eldest whore in Mère's brothel despite all her experience. This is one of them.





	In Mère's House

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [Der Kunde](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19093747) by [Jeanny Turner (Ginada)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ginada/pseuds/Jeanny%20Turner). 



_**Le Havre, in 2000** _

 

I trickled a few drops of my facial tonic on a small round cotton pad and wiped the smeared lipstick off my cheeks and throat. Using the reflection of the small mirror on the windowpane behind the bed I carefully reapplied new colour to my lips.

There was a knock on the door and it was opened without waiting for my answer. Mère’s big head appeared in the door, her searching glance scrutinising the room. Everybody here called her Mère, me too, even though I probably was a few years older than her. Only Madeleine was even older than me, and she, too, called her Mère.

“Are you ready, Hadiza?” said Mère. “I’ve got someone for you.”

“Yeah of course.”

She gave me a quick smile. “Fine, I’ll send him up. I think he’s one for a jump-start, quite cute, actually. You’re gonna have fun.” She winked and her head vanished. A jump-start, as we called it, was when men came here to have their first time. A lot of them thought they would have better chances with women in real life after that, or they were ashamed by their inexperience. I didn’t mind them, most who came for a jump-start were friendly, not brutal and finished quickly.

I checked the room, yes, everything was in order. In the mirror next to the door I checked whether there were any stains on my négligé and, as always, I looked into the shelves next to the bed to check if everything was there. Lube, condoms, a few toys, and, hidden at the very back, a knife, just in case of emergency. I sight inwardly when my eye caught the time on the watch lying in the shelves. In another life I would be praying the sallar magariba now. I never prayed when I was working. I did feel bad because of all the missed prayers, but when I prayed in between customers I felt as if I was dirtying the holy words by the surroundings.

Then he stood in the door. Light-skinned, and I mean _really_ light-skinned, the hair still wet from the shower every customer in Mère’s house was obliged to take – another reason why I liked it here and only rarely missed Paris and the dreams I buried there anymore. His hair was of an unusual white-blond colour, even though it was wet I could see that, and maybe it was because of this he appeared to be so very young. He couldn’t be older than twenty years, I thought. That was younger than I had expected, most twenty-year-olds weren’t desperate or hard-boiled enough to pay for sex – even though the cases did exist where some eighteen-year-old was brought in by his drunk friends who thought the visit here a fitting birthday present.

“Bonsoir, mon bel homme,” I said in my deepest, most seductive voice, even though I had trouble seeing this slender boy as a man. But he was a customer. Mère closed the door behind him and startled, he took a step forward into the chamber. His insecurity filled the whole room and felt overwhelming. Well, this should be fun, I sighed silently to myself and rose to go to him.

“Bonsoir, Madame,” he said and didn’t lose sight of me for one second while I approached him. He was wearing a white shirt which was at the same time obviously unfashionable and tailor-made, you develop an eye for such things in my profession. Customers with tailor-made clothing were wealthier, but also more demanding. Even stranger than the style of his shirt were his trousers. There cut was better suited for the sixties, and the wine-red fabric with some geometrical weaving pattern had certainly never be fashionable at all. An eccentric, apparently. He must have redressed after the shower. Most didn’t do that, they just went up with a towel around the waist.

“Je m’appelle Ebony,” I purred. I used to go by the name of Princess, but after reaching a certain age I thought it silly. And here Ebony was advantageous, marketing-wise, there weren’t a lot of black whores in Le Havre and I was the only on in Mère’s House.

I put a hand on his chest and intended to unbutton his shirt, but at the first touch he flinched back. Inwardly I rolled my eyes, this was going to be quite a bit of work. But it happened with customers coming for the first time. After all, it was a new situation for them.

“Are you a shy one, chéri?” I giggled. “I’ll do exactly how you like, you’re gonna love it. Don’t worry. How do you want me to start?”

He kept staring at me and swallowed heavily. “I’m not sure.” He spoke quickly and quietly and his French hat I slight accent I couldn’t place. I reached out for him again and this time he allowed my hands to stroke over his chest, but he froze so completely I decided to chit-chat a bit until he relaxed.

“What’s your name, chéri?” I asked. He stared at me and I laughed in the bubbling way I knew men liked. “Don’t worry, beautiful, you don’t have to tell. But if you do, I won’t tell anybody you were here. I’m discretion personified.” I imitated the movement of a key locking my mouth and threw the invisible key away. “Will you tell me at least where you come from? You aren’t French, are you, chéri?”

“I’m English,” he answered, and I took it as a good sign he had finally given a proper answer.

“Ah very cool. We can talk in English if you want,” I said hoping he would relax a bit when using his native language. I didn’t have a lot of opportunities using my English nowadays and it was probably a bit rusty, but I’ve learned it before I learned French, after all.

However he vehemently shook his head. “No, I’d rather not,” he said in French.

“As you wish, chéri. Everything as you please, that’s what I’m here for. We’ll do exactly how you like. Slowly, if you like.” He came here for sex after all, and to sex this had to be heading in the end. But slowly was fine with me, he was paying by time anyway. I started unbuttoning his shirt and he let it happen, even though he was frozen again. Very well, maybe that was his kink, I thought, even though a bad feeling started to creep up in me. He just didn’t seem to be into it at all, not into me, not into the whole situation, and usually at least the punter should enjoy the whole thing, that’s why it was happening. The bad feeling increased when after opening the second button only I uncovered a white scar. It was thin and smooth, but I could neither see where it began nor where it ended, it had to be quite long. After previous experience with him I didn’t think it clever to ask about the scar.

„How come a handsome young man like you is coming to Mère’s house?” I asked instead, so I could pay him a compliment. “Certainly a lot of nice young ladies must be after you?”

He shrugged and with the same movement here turned in a way that shook my hands off his shirt. “I don’t really like to socialise,” he muttered. If he behaved like this everywhere it was hardly a surprise.

I stepped back and sat on the bed. “Listen, chéri, you’ll need to tell me what you want, or just let me do what I think.” That was a capitulation, of course. It was my job to work out what the men wanted without them having to tell, then they were the most satisfied. “You came here for a reason, you want to have your first time, and we want it …“ I stopped when I saw his confused expression.

“Why do you think I want to have my first time?” he asked.

“Well, this is a brothel, people come here to have sex.”

He looked at me as if he thought me a total idiot. “I know. That’s why I’m here. But I already had sex,” he stumbled over the word _sex_ as if he had difficulties pronouncing it. “It’s not my first time”

Oh. “Oh pardon. It’s just, most young men your age come because of that,” I tried to explain. “That’s why I assumed.” It wasn’t only his age, it was his obvious insecurity just as much, but of course I didn’t tell him that. “Then we can do what you liked the most, chéri,” I cooed and tried to return from the sober tone we had reached back to one more suitable for my profession. “Who was the lucky first girl?” I breathed in his ear and resumed unbuttoning the shirt. He slid a bit away from me, but still he smiled for the first time, or at least the corners of his moth turned upwards the tiniest bit.

“Funnily enough she was French. An exchange student at my school, you could say.”

“Aah, and look, now you’re in France again. You’ve come full circle.”

He actually had given me a real answer, but he still wouldn’t let me come nearer. I was coming to my wits’ end, but actually, that wasn’t really my problem, was it. “How long have you been together, you and your petite amie? Or perhaps you are still dating?” I winked suggestively. Maybe it was his fantasy to sleep with an older black woman and he was so inhibited because he was cheating on his girlfriend. But it didn’t seem likely, lots of married men visited us and weren’t that strange.

He shook his head. “We never really dated.”

“And that’s why you’re coming to me. That’s probably a while ago, when you were still in school. There wasn’t anybody since?” I decided to try something more and let the straps of my négligé slip off my shoulder, the first one – “There was,” he said – and then the second one. “Yeah?” I asked teasingly. “I thought you don’t like socialising. How many were it then?” He had been staring at me the whole time and he still kept his eyes fixed on me for a long second, and then finally, suddenly, he looked away.

“I don’t know,” he whispered and even though he was whispering I heard his voice breaking. It’s a cliché, but you actually get that sinking feeling when a bad feeling is suddenly confirmed, as if your heart sinks into your boots. Oh no. My thoughts were running through all kinds of possible plausible explanations why he didn’t know how many people he’d slept with – maybe he binge drank on parties, or he was a swinger, but deep down I already knew none of the harmless explanations fitted with his behaviour. I pulled the straps back up, so the négligé was covering my breasts completely again, and heavily sat next to him on the bed without trying to touch him again. “Oh kid,” I said sadly. “Do you want to talk about it?”

At first he didn’t say anything, but then, quickly, “I hoped I could just come here, sleep with some women and get over it. Cover up memories, rewrite them, whatever, I don’t know. But I can’t stand it when you touch me, not even when you only touch my clothes and undress me.” He smiled at me ruefully. “It’s not your fault. I wanted you because you’re as different from them as possible …” He stopped and stared broodingly down at his hands clutched together in his lap.

“They were men?” I asked. I knew I probably shouldn’t ask, but I wanted to know what happened to him, why this this boy was sitting on the edge of my work bed breaking my heart, even though I only met him a couple of minutes before.

He nodded silently. “Mostly,” he added. “I think. I wasn’t always conscious.”

“I’m so, so sorry kid. That’s horrible.”

He shrugged. “People are horrible. Evil. Me, too. I probably deserved it.”

“No way!” I sad and took his hand in an impulse. I was ready to regret it, but this time he didn’t pull it away, at least not immediately.

“I show you why.“ To my surprise he started unbuttoning his shirt himself now, but with the cufflinks, and then only rolled up his sleeves. Both of his forearms were marred by some scars, thicker and newer than the one on his chest, especially on the left arm, were the scars were crisscrossing over and distorting a faded tattoo, it must have been older than them.

“Do you know what that is?” he asked and held his arm in front of me. “No, of course you don’t” he answered himself in an instant without waiting for my reply. “It means that I hate people like you. That I’m part of an organisation that persecutes people of your kind.” He had to be talking about some kind of racist group. Was there something like the Ku-Klux-Klan in England? A group that marked their members with a tattoo on the forearm?

Carefully, I said, “I didn’t get the impression that you hate me.”

“Well, because I want something from you I’m polite,” he said bitingly.

“We’re not actually having sex, as you probably noticed,” I remarked.

“And besides, it doesn’t really look like you’re very happy with that organisation,” I said and gently stroked my finger over one of the scars on his arm.

“It doesn’t exist anymore.”

“Kid, you aren’t cutting yourself, aren’t you? Promise me to get help if you need it. Cutting doesn’t solve any problems.” I’ve had a colleague in Paris who used to harm herself. It had been a vicious circle, with fresh wounds she couldn’t work because it scared away the punters, without punters she was broke and felt even more worthless and hurt herself again. Someday she didn’t return, no idea what has become of her.

“It was only once and I didn’t do it on purpose. I lost control, I don’t even remember it.” He wanted to roll down his sleeves but I had spotted something else and took hold of his arm. There were injection sites in the crook of his arm. Damn, the boy didn’t seem to skip any problem you could have. Realistically he was a pretty hopeless case and I started wondering how he got the money to pay for a whore. However, he seemed to be from the upper class, even though it was a mystery to me how a child from a good family could go down to a fate like this.

“Are you doing drugs, kid? What are you using?” It couldn’t be something good if he was injecting it. I thank god I never succumbed to the temptation of hard drugs, at least alcohol wasn’t that expensive. The profession wasn’t nice, but well paid, and I had been able to build my mother a house with my earnings. I would have never been able if I had become addicted, like many prostitutes do. Aurica had started spending almost everything she earned on Heroin in the last months, Mère was already threatening to throw her out, and we all knew that sooner or later it would come to this.

“I tried something. An experiment,” he murmured. “Didn’t work very well. I’m not sleeping well,” he added as an explanation. “I thought something, how do you guys call it, opiate-based? I thought it could help.”

“You’re not sleeping well? Are you having nightmares?”

He nodded.

“Do you have someone to talk to?” I asked. Obviously what he needed was professional psychological care, but he probably knew this himself. And who has lived and worked as I have doesn’t believe therapies solve any problems, at least not forced ones. From time to time girls I knew had ben sectioned, in Paris, too, and in the end they usually returned to the streets. “What about friends? Your mother? Is she alive?” I had stopped taking things about his life for granted.

“Yeah, in England. My parents still live in the house where … it … happened.”

That probably explained why he was in France. Why hadn’t his family come with him? “Do they know about it?” I asked.

He shrugged. “My mother does. My father … no idea, I’m not going to ask him.”

Where was this supposed to lead us? Why was I asking him all those things and getting myself deeper and deeper involved in his problems? God knows I had enough of those myself, and after that there were those of my family and the girls of Mère’s House I should take care of, but not some customer’s I hardly knew one hour. Even if he looked so damn young and appealed to all my motherly instincts and I felt I needed to just hug him, I should stop digging. The more I would know about him, the more it would haunt me later. And I couldn’t help him anyway, even if I’ve had the impression that he would allow it, which I didn’t.

I remembered another traumatised customer, it probably had been more than ten years ago. He had been totally different, not only because he had been older. Humans probably break in different ways. He’d had absolutely no problem telling he was raped by his teacher, more detailed than I ever had wanted to know. And he had been brutal, that day I couldn’t take any more customers and I had been in pain for days. Fortunately punters like that were rare at Mère’s.

I heard him gasping and he looked at me, horrified.

“I’m just like them, am I?” he asked. “People who just take other people. The money makes no difference.”

Confused I wondered why he brought that up now, he could have hardly read my thoughts about that terrible punter from ten years ago.

“Hey kid, calm down, okay? You are certainly not like those people who hurt you. And besides, we didn’t do anything,” I tried to reassure him.

“But I intended to. At least in theory.” He looked at me piercingly. „Are you doing this voluntarily?“

Oh dear, now he wanted to save me, this mess was getting more and more complicated. “Yes, I do. Of course this wasn’t the job I dreamt of as a little girl.” I laughed when I remembered all the high-flown plans I’ve had as a child. “But it was easy money. I wanted to be a dancer, you know. But the dancing school was expensive, and I always said ‘Just a little while longer, until I can afford the school’, and then it was until I could afford a better apartment, until I had a well-paid other job, until I paid off the house. At some time I accepted that this was my job now, there won’t be something else. A few more years and I’ll be able to enjoy my retirement, much sooner than others.”

He listened to me, his head slightly slanted, as if my story wasn’t like a thousand other people’s story. Because he seemed honestly interested, I continued talking. “But you are right in a way, a lot of girls don’t do it voluntarily. Or not really voluntarily.” I made a gesture towards the right. “Mihaela for example, in the room next door, she’s got two small kids and a husband with failing kidneys in Romania, they need the money badly and as quickly as possible to pay for the surgery or else the husband will die.” I sighed. “Don’t think too hard about it. That’s the way the world works, we can’t change it, and you’ve got enough problems of your own.”

He nodded hesitantly.

“Well? If you want to try something we can still do it. Ever so slowly, if you want.”

“Even if I wanted, I wouldn’t want to do it with you anymore. You’re too nice. And not really my type, to be honest.”

I roared with laughter, “Well, I’ll take it as compliment, kid.” I stopped laughing and asked, “May I give you an advice?”

“I’ll probably won’t want to hear it, right?”

“I don’t know. Nothing bad, I promise. That you should stay away from drugs and go to therapy you know yourself. What I want to tell you is that you should allow yourself time. With having sex, I mean. Someday you’ll meet someone you’ll love, and you will trust them, and it will happen just naturally. It will be totally different. But you can’t force that. With a whore it will never be intimate enough, it will always remind you of bad stuff. But with someone you love it will be different, I think.”

He looked sceptical as he got up, but he nodded. “Maybe,” he said. “I thank you for the conversation. And your understanding, Ebony.” He took my hand.

“Hadiza,” I said, and when he looked at me confused, “My real name. Hadiza.”

“Oh, I see. Draco,” he smiled, an actual open smile for the first time. “My name.”

He shook my hand.

“Merci, Hadiza, pour tout.”

He pulled a wooden stick out of his pocket which puzzled me, I thought he was about to leave now.

“Je suis désolé. _Obliviate_.”

 

* * *

 

Of course the girls asked if I had a lover when the bouquet was brought for me. From time to time it happened that a punter fell in love, and some simply sent flowers hoping to receive better service. But this bouquet was strange. Not only was it huge, it also consisted of an odd mixture of roses of all colours but red and lucky bamboo, and came without any card or other information about the sender. Nobody could be naïve enough to send a bouquet of flowers to a brothel and expect the recipient to know who bought it for her, so the whole thing remained mysterious. I inquired in some flower shops, secretly driven by the illusory hope that it actually was a suitor and I might still find a husband in the end. I actually did find a shop which had the sale of the appropriate number of roses and lucky bamboo noted in its books, but the shopgirl who worked in the corresponding time couldn’t remember a thing about that hour. The owner, who was a customer of Mère’s house, and me questioned her thoroughly, but her memory remained blank.

**Author's Note:**

> I couldn't resist and translated one of my works again - but still I'm neither a native speaker nor a translator, so please correct me if you spot mistakes. I found it very interesting how hard translating is even when it's your own work so you definitely know exactly what the author wants to say.  
> I should say that I don't actually know a lot about prostitution, I hope nobody feels offended by the way I wrote it and it's not too silly. I'm aware that the whole thing, as it is told in first person, could be written a lot more slangy, but I felt the clean language somewhat conveys they're not actually speaking English.  
> Feedback to the story is welcome as well, and bonus points go to whoever figures out why I let Draco send Hadiza lucky bamboo.


End file.
